Young And Dumb

Humdinger1

@Mx_Emmin love your categories! Do you pay into them all over the year? You must have the world's biggest chocolate casting come Easter if so, possibly delivered by a crane...also made of chocolate? Go you love Humdinger x

Mx_Emmin

Humdinger1 said:

@Mx_Emmin love your categories! Do you pay into them all over the year? You must have the world's biggest chocolate casting come Easter if so, possibly delivered by a crane...also made of chocolate? Go you love Humdinger x

Haha thanks... I don't save the whole year, just for 2-3 months beforehand. Though maybe I should next year lol. I'm only trying to save up £40 though, for some Hotel Chocolat ones

Mx_Emmin

I bought the dog some fancy dog treats - a bit on the expensive side (£10 for 6 but they last a few months so I can space them out)

Also, I got called to my first appointment with the NHS Gender Clinic! I thought I'd have another 6 to 12 months to wait. I am slightly closer to the Top Surgery of my dreams haha

Mx_Emmin

In the last 24 hours

- sent off documents for passport 

- got 1st gender clinic apt

- got date for 2nd-to-last step of divorce 

This week has good vibes

Mx_Emmin

Bought an early birthday present for myself, a sims expansion pack
 
Normally its £35ish and I had £20 set aside, and I was pretty confident I could find the remainder, except the Manchester trip later this month is a bit of a wild card budget wise, so its have to wait until after that, except the sale brought it down to £17.95 so I could just buy it last night
 
Also, the dogs bag of food is running out sooner than expected so moving money from my "clothes" category to the dog food & treats category
 
Parenthood is hard lol
 
 Admittedly it probably would have been less if I wasn't also buying another dog puzzle...

Mx_Emmin

My dog Sherlock Bones w my partner’s guinea pigs. We’ve told him he’s not allowed to touch the cage so he just sort of meerkats in front of it.

The partner/relationship is new so Sherlock’s meeting the guinea’s for the second time ever in these pics.

The guineas are AMAZINGLY chill but Sherlock is upset he isnt allowed to play w them. The guineas are even eating whilst he’s looking at them, which I’m told is the maximum sign of relaxness for guineas haha

Sherlock isn’t being aggressive which is a big relief, he’s a toy poodle x Yorkshire terrier, and those are both hunting breeds so we were a bit nervous. But he essentially acts & sounds like he lost his ball under the sofa.

Mx_Emmin

**trumpet noises** The Wordpress site, life-after-debt.co.uk, is now active! 

Also in regards to the Gender clinic appointment - it went very well, but we dont set a treatment plan until the next appointment. Initially we're going to look at Gamete Storage, before we start on hormones and surgeries. The clinic told me it would be in about 2 months, someone else said for them it was 7 months. Make of that what you will. I guess to know the full story you'll have to follow me on Wordpress haha.

Mx_Emmin

I was having an overtime at work dilemma - work is currently offering enhanced overtime if I go in early and answer the phones. Its tempting, who couldn't use a little extra cash? But I also have 3 or 4 conditions that could arguably cause chronic fatigue and I'm worried about the impact. I just about decided to ask if I could start at one day a week and go from there... only to find out the enhanced overtime stops next week. Overtime is still available, but just at the standard rate I get in my normal hours. I'll pass, for now.

Part of why I was considering it was because of my decreasing act balance - my act balance has been creeping downwards the last few months. All my spending has been budgeted for, so it's not necessarily a problem, but it's a stark contrast to the previous year. I'm not entirely sure what's happened as I'm not saving any less than usual. There was Christmas, I suppose, then the divorce fees, then the little mistake with the house deposit funding. Still. My main account balance is now under 4k today, where last year it was hovering around 5k.

I think I need to split up dog toys & treats from dog food. It's worked fine until now, but with going for the bulk orders of food, I need to have £x by a certain date, and trying to buy treats and toys as well from the same category just confuses the targets. I've decided to go with £15pm for food (it'll build up to £45 to bulk buy food, I bought some earlier this week and it was £40 but inflation may kick in by next time) and £10 pm for Treats & Toys.

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When I was transferring blog posts over to Wordpress I read my previous comments on the USA insurrection, and I keep wondering if I should talk about Ukraine on here too. But why? For posterity? There are so many people offering their takes on the matter, and I am certainly on the less informed end of the spectrum. I'm having less emotional fallout than compared to the USA insurrection. Maybe I'm just in a better place overall emotionally. Maybe its because I dont know anyone in Ukraine, but I have friends in America. Maybe I'm just desensitized after the last few years. I've hit capacity. It's not that I dont care, obviously I care, but it's not consuming my thoughts the way the insurrection did.

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I've got an insanely busy social week coming up - who did I think I was when I made these plans? I do not have energy for all this! Or money tbh 😬😬 We'll work it out as we go

Mx_Emmin

Now that the finance blog is up and running, my brain keeps suggesting I do a sims blog as well. It was easier to ignore before, with the deadline to transfer my posts before the old forum closed down, but all the posts are transferred now. I’m not saying I’d keep it up, or even finish building the site, but I think I might need to do it to get the idea out of my head lol. I could have a page, with all the “Current State of” houses, and then the individual posts would be one week in sim time (or one rotation, as I switch households every week), and I could do categories by family so you could read one family at a time if you wanted. So anyway if you like SimLit (Sims 4 in particular) you can follow me at littlesimsstories, which was just whichever URL they had free that day.

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I have got SO MANY social events set up for me this week. Seriously, who did I think I was when I made this many plans? So I’m just getting it over with and WAMing ahead of time (From the YNAB website: Whack-a-Mole/WAM: You know that carnival game where you use the foam mallet to bop mechanical moles on the head as they pop up randomly from their holes? Yeah, we do that with our budget. Budget whack-a-mole, or WAM, is when you have to borrow money from one budget category to cover expenses in another.) So at this moment in time my “Social Spends” category has over £70 in, which is kind of insane considering I’ve spent from that category multiple times already this month.

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I talked to my therapist about the fact that I always feel guilty about not giving enough to Charity etc (I’m using quite a loose definition of “charity” here, also including things like GoFundMe, Patreon) and he suggested setting a % of my budget aside for charity each month. I have seen other people on the forums discussing/doing this, but its very often framed in a religious context, and me and religion have Bad Blood, so I never really though about it for myself. But, it might be helpful. So I’m going to try work that into my budget from 1st May. I am going to try make donations in April too, because I’ll have that work bonus, but from May I’ll be using standard work pay. I’m going to start at £10 pm, which I know is not a %, but ssh, we start small and increase over time. Besides, 1% of my mean take-home salary so far in 2022 is £14.50, so £10 is like… 0.66 % approx? Thats still a % !

Part of the reason I’m waiting until May is the rising cost of living UK (and everywhere else, but for me the UK part is most relevant). In April some of our taxes are increasing, plus we get a slight raise at work, plus I increased my pension contribution, so by May hopefully I’ll get an idea of what my new take-home pay looks like. So far I’ve been relatively shielded from the cost of living rises but its starting to creep in around the edges.

The main thing “protecting” me this far is that I live in a shared house and my rent is all inclusive of bills. I know logically that the household bills must be increasing – because everyone’s are – but so far my rent has not. And from taking a brief look at rental websites, I can see that I am now paying below market value for a room. So I’m just sort of waiting for the lead tenant to raise my rent, he would be fully justified in doing so. Of course, if he did do that, then I would less willing to put up with him smoking weed in the house and would look more seriously at other rooms. He agreed not to smoke in the common areas but I think regular users become nose-blind to it and don’t realise how much it leeches out throughout the house. I have no moral objection to weed, in fact in general I do fall on the “legalise it” side of the debate…. but I absolutely cannot stand the stench. Yikes. But its cheap here, and finding pet friendly accommodation is HARD.

Humdinger1

Impressive plans and you think them through so clearly @Mx_Emmin.  There are lots of pet friendly rental websites; sorry but don't think I can post other websites on here.  I'd move because if the lead tenant gets turfed out for his habits, where would that leave you?